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Reined by Strings

Kim M. Russell, 10th April 2019

My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads Poems in April Day 10: Open a Book

For the tenth challenge of this NaPoWriMo, Anmol with like us to pick up any books lying closest to us or pick them from our bookshelves: poetry collections, novels, dictionaries, telephone directories… we should just pick one up and open page at random. The first sentence of that page is our source of inspiration for a new poem, which we can write in three ways:

Use all the words of the sentence in the poem;

Pick a word or phrase from the sentence for the title or the poem;

Use a part or the entire sentence as the first or last line of the poem.

The book I picked up from my shelf was Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist and I’ve tried to do all three with the first ‘sentence’ of the poem ‘Gravities’.

Ooh, how ingenious is this structure! This kite is definitely going to find its own way in the wind.
The imagery throughout sets the scene so well — it’s like a watercolour with the movement reflected through the swathes of colour and activity. And the ending is a gem. I loved it, Kim! 🙂

Love the structure. Not just the shape itself, but how it tells the poem through it (especially in the thinning of the string when it speaks of mothers tugging on their children’s frivolity). I also adore just how fun it is to read… I found myself moving my head from sight to side, following the shape of the string. 😀

I’m so pleased you like it, Magaly. 😊 I have now come to the end of all the poems I wrote before I went to my daughter’s. At the moment, I’m on my way home on a train, speeding through the countryside. I’ll have to get back in the swing of things tomorrow morning. I’m excited to see what the next prompt is.